shrader Posted February 16, 2011 Share Posted February 16, 2011 watson is an extemely impressive accomplishment. i certainly get that the nuances of language are being appreciated by the computer, albeit through text. but it would be that much more impressive (and useful) to have it done the way humans do it...through "hearing". after all, the "natural" and thus most efficient interface with humans would seem to be the spoken word. as you can tell, i've been frustrated with the pace of speech recognition technology improvements in the last 20 years. i'm sure your scientists are as well. i was hoping for a major breakthrough resulting from a project such as this. alas, science doesn't usually work that way. I'm sure it's a subject for a completely different thread, but I don't know how we can expect great advances in speech recognition when the vast majority of the people out there can't even speak in the first place. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
birdog1960 Posted February 16, 2011 Share Posted February 16, 2011 Regardless of your desire for advances in speech recognition, that simply wasn't part of this particular project. The goal was not to take the spoken language and interpret it - it was to take language (however inputted) and interpret it as a (super smart, super fast) human would. Realize also - discussions of the potential application of this technology are focused more on mining/understanding thousands/millions of stored written documents, not interpreting the spoken word (as I said before - the real work/technology is applied AFTER the prompt is received). isn't this even tangentially about marketing? is it really all about pure research for future application? if they could have done it, they should have. that leads me to believe that they couldn't. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jerry Christ Posted February 17, 2011 Share Posted February 17, 2011 who cares......... haha ok Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ramius Posted February 17, 2011 Share Posted February 17, 2011 (edited) I've been watching and still insist that Watson cheats, especially on the buzzer. He can ring in before any of the humans even have a chance to, especially when he's sure of the answer. I've been playing video games since i was 5, and if there's one consistency across all platforms, the CPU always cheats. It's still true today. It was true in the jeopardy game. In a true fair jeopardy match, they'd kick his ass. I'm also not buying the "Toronto" argument. I don't care that eh missed the question, the fact remains that the category was US cities, and he didn't even give a US city as a response. Throughout all of this my girlfriend keeps telling me i sound liek Will Smith from I, Robot. Edited February 17, 2011 by Ramius Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dib Posted February 17, 2011 Share Posted February 17, 2011 OPen the pod bay door Hal. Hal..............? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
birdog1960 Posted February 17, 2011 Share Posted February 17, 2011 who cares....... how bout columbia university medical center and u of maryland med school?link....to my point however, from the u maryland spokesman: "in a busy medical practice if you want help from the computer, you really don't have time to manually input the info". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Senator Posted February 17, 2011 Share Posted February 17, 2011 (edited) I've been watching and still insist that Watson cheats, especially on the buzzer. He can ring in before any of the humans even have a chance to, especially when he's sure of the answer. I've been playing video games since i was 5, and if there's one consistency across all platforms, the CPU always cheats. It's still true today. It was true in the jeopardy game. In a true fair jeopardy match, they'd kick his ass. I'm also not buying the "Toronto" argument. I don't care that eh missed the question, the fact remains that the category was US cities, and he didn't even give a US city as a response. Apparently differentiating Canada and the US is not the only thing that ' confuses ' poor Watston - I was watching the Nova special where he also had difficulty discerning between male and female, identifying as Richard Nixon the ' former First Lady born Thelma Catherine Ryan in 1912 ' Regarding the whole buzzer thing, and cheating in general - IBM has always had the reputation of being somewhat underhanded and for pushing overpriced, technologically inferior products on less-than-enthused IT groups by using the veiled threat that, "No one ever lost their job for buying IBM," while leveraging their CFO/CEO level relationships to intimidate lower-level systems analysts who would otherwise buy less expensive and technologically superior products. isn't this even tangentially about marketing? is it really all about pure research for future application? if they could have done it, they should have. that leads me to believe that they couldn't. " tangentially " ??? I would love to know how much IBM paid the producers of Jeopardy for that 3-day long infomercial! . Edited February 17, 2011 by The Senator Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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